The Far Right Today. A lecture by Cas Mudde

Today’s far right is neither your grandfather’s world-destroying fascism, nor your father’s ineffective radical right. Its mainstreaming and normalization is the major threat to liberal democracies around the world. This night, Cas Mudde explains why it’s high time to help fight off this threat.

In his new book, The Far Right Today, Mudde analyses how the far right has left the political margins for the political mainstream, blurring the distinction between the two. From Jerusalem to London to Washington, no country is immune to it. In the last years far right parties entered parliament in Germany and Spain and government in Estonia. In the US, President Donald Trump is reshaping the Republican Party in his own image, as hate crime and white terrorism surges, while the BJP is on track to extend its government rule in India. All the while, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is moving his country closer to its right-wing authoritarian past. In response to these global developments Mudde calls out to strengthen liberal democracy for the future.

About the speakers

Cas Mudde is the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF Professor in the School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) at the University of Georgia (USA) and Professor II at the Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX) at the University of Oslo (Norway). His book Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2007) won the Stein Rokkan Award for Comparative Social Science Research in 2008. His recent books include (with Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser) Populism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2017), The Far Right in America (Routledge, 2018), and The Far Right Today (Polity, 2019). His forthcoming book (with Sivan Hirsch-Hoefler) is Settling for Success: The Israeli Settler Movement (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Sarah L. de Lange (moderator) is Professor by special appointment at the Department of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. Since 2016 she holds the Dr. J.M. Den Uyl chair, a chair established by the Wiardi Beckman Foundation. She is currently working on a project funded by the Open Research Area entitled Sub-National Context and Radical Right Support in Europe.

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